Reflection
by Nate Grey
Summary: Very little good can come of Danzō and Sai in the same room as Tenten's corpse.  Very, very little.


Notes: I always wanted to do a conspiracy theory like this centered around Tenten, but never quite managed it. The general idea has been rolling around in my head for some time now, and manga developments with Danzō forced it out at last. Tempted to call it stream of consciousness, but I'll call it what it really is: messy and disjointed, and I can't be bothered to fix it again. But there is a story hidden in there, see if you can find it.

Warning: Tenten is dead the entire story, but it's still about her. Sort of. And don't worry, the summary is purposely misleading.

Summary: Very little good can come of Danzō and Sai in the same room as Tenten's corpse. Very, very little.

* * *

**Reflection**

**A Naruto Fanfic by**

**Nate Grey (xman0123-at-aol-dot-com)**

* * *

Death is a swift, almost automated process in a ninja village like Konoha. It is expected, and the preparations are always in place. In a sense, no one living in such a place dies unexpectedly, they merely take another step within the endless cycle.

There are no undertakers or morticians, or at least, there is no one that answers to such titles exclusively. There are only ninja who also have these skills among a myriad of others, all needed to carry out their professions. As such, they are not paid by the families of the deceased, but receive small, regular additions to their mission payments. This has always been the way. Shinobi are bringers of death, and it only makes sense that at least some of them are handlers of death as well.

Of course, there are exceptions. There have to be. Some fallen ninja, such as the Hokages past, have been so vital to a village's survival that they simply cannot be processed in the usual way, by the usual hands. The temptation to steal secrets or treasures would be far too great for any average ninja. It has long been the practice that clans generally process their own dead, and even in the very special cases, only select ANBU are permitted to process the body.

Naturally, these rules are neither iron-clad nor perfect. Nothing ever is where ninja are involved. Bodies have disappeared, been stolen or replaced, or supposedly simply ceased to exist. It is, sadly, a regular occurrence with fallen ninja of considerable fame.

What can be safely said is that the best way for a body to go missing, is for it to be one of many that died all at once. And nothing meets such circumstances quite so well as a war, or, to keep things a bit more simple, a localized massacre. And if there is one thing that most ninja are good at, it is killing other ninja.

* * *

It is not a widely-known fact that Shimura Danzō was far more evil than Orochimaru had ever been. Perhaps the only reason most people were unaware of this was rather simple: Orochimaru got caught, made his intentions public, and quickly rose to infamy as one of Konoha's greatest enemies.

This is not to say that Danzō was never caught or accused of any wrongdoing. It was just that in those cases, he had enough dirt on his accusers to make their own intentions seem just as, if not more questionable than his own, so the charges never stuck. And Danzō's stated position was always that of a patriot of Konoha, doing the dirty work that no one else quite had a taste for, but that was still necessary for the village's continued providence. People often questioned his methods, but they could never argue with his results. So he was generally classified as a lesser but needed evil, and at least one that wanted the village to flourish.

Orochimaru's inhumane experiments are thought to be the most gruesome, pain-filled tortures ever imagined by the human mind, producing misshapen ghouls that were sometimes barely even recognizable as human.

Danzō had no need for such grandstanding. His was the kind of torture that would make Morino Ibiki sick to his stomach, all without leaving a physical mark. To put it simply, if Danzō had been allowed the proper resources, he could have produced young ninjas that would grow to easily surpass Orochimaru and Uchiha Itachi on an annual basis. They would only answer to him, they would have nothing even resembling a soul, and they would be ten times more likely to turn on their own comrades, but other than that, they'd be perfect massacre machines.

* * *

Tenten was not the first body that Sai had stolen for Danzō, but she was easily the most interesting.

Sai had only spoken to her a handful of times, and almost always during missions, so there had been few to no chances of him getting attached to her. Despite that, she was still a friend of Naruto's (although not a close one), so Sai made sure to handle her body with a bit more respect than he normally would.

At any rate, Danzō had only specified that there be no damage to her face. Sai wondered about this, but didn't question it. His first thought was that Danzō wanted to shrink and preserve her head. He'd never done anything of the sort (that Sai knew of), but he'd certainly done stranger things with corpses, including hacking them up and then shuffling the parts around like some morbid jigsaw puzzle.

And at least Tenten was already dead, because Sai was quite sure that it wouldn't have mattered greatly to Danzō if she hadn't been.

* * *

Tenten had always been special, though she never knew it.

Her father was a great fighter from a great clan, and her mother, while not as well-known, certainly had great talent in areas that are best left unnamed. In the end, they were both loyal Leaf-nin, and that was what ultimately led to their early deaths.

Tenten had no family name because her parents left theirs behind long ago, and because unknown, unwanted children are never missed, and the easiest to place where one finds the best use for them. For her part, Tenten eventually found a home with an aging blacksmith and his wife. They were not exactly ideal parents, but they fed her well, kept decent clothes on her back, and always made sure that she carried no less than ten different weapons whenever she left the house. It would not have surprised Tenten to learn that this old couple was once a pair of skilled ninja. It would surprise her, however, if she found out that they were still on an active roster (albeit a well-hidden one), and that they, not unlike her own parents, were not actually married, didn't care about each other in the least, and yet somehow were still more dedicated to the mission than most married people in the village were to each other.

Although she should have, Tenten never questioned her skill with hitting targets without fail. She attributed this entirely to hard work, partially because she is friends with Rock Lee, but mostly because she HAS worked at it, far longer than most kunoichi her age had. But it was a fact that Tenten didn't miss, not while drunk, drugged, half-asleep, bleeding heavily, or even while writhing in agony. What was more important was not the fact that she didn't miss, so much as the implication that she simply couldn't miss, even if she wanted to.

Tenten saw Shimura Danzō only once in her life, when she was still a little girl. She ran past him in a crowd during a festival, marked him as an old, uninteresting man, and never gave him a second glance.

It would have bothered her, had she been able to feel his eyes on her, but of course, she didn't.

The next time that Tenten came in contact with Danzō, he was standing over her corpse.

This is not to say that Danzō would kill her. Rather, in the act of having sent her parents to their death, Danzō ensured that Tenten's life would be a long one, or at least one full of many experiences. It was the least he could do: he robbed her of her parents, and indeed, anything even resembling a choice in her life. Tenten's existence had been entirely planned out by Danzō, including her death. In a very indirect way, he adored her, or at least he felt what some might dare to call affection for one part of Tenten's body, but it was more accurately termed desire.

* * *

The procedure is not so much an autopsy as it as an extraction.

They already know the cause of death, anyway: the large, blackened hole in Tenten's chest is impossible to miss. She reportedly suffered a great deal, but that much is also obvious.

Danzō knows all this, and doesn't care. It isn't her chest he's concerned with.

He is no surgeon, but his hands and chakra are both expertly trained, and the old motions come back to him as if he'd done this only hours before.

Once he is done, Danzō turns away and carefully drops the eyes into a small container, half-filled with a sickly green fluid. He adds, in specific order, various liquids that most probably never should have been concocted, nearly all of which use a certain clan's blood as a base. By the time he is done, the container's contents are tainted crimson, but this is superficial.

Danzō passes his hand over the container, leaving a small trail of chakra in his wake.

It is done.

He opens one eye, then unwraps the other, and after Danzō has expelled the subtle but powerful genjutsu cast over the eyes, he smiles.

And if Tenten's newly revealed Sharingan were still in her head, he imagines that she might smile as well, dead or not.

* * *

Although she is a ghost, Tenten is horrified by what she sees.

She is not, however, looking at the extraction, although that is rather disgusting by itself.

She is instead looking at the list, in Danzō's spidery scrawl, on a nearby desk. The list is titled "Spare Parts," and there are indeed parts listed, either as singles or doubles. But all of these parts are still in use, and their owners are even listed right beside them.

Tenten's name has just been crossed off.

But several others remain, including those of Kurenai and her young son.

* * *

The Sharingan, from the moment of its birth, has been plotting. It is the greatest of all master manipulators, and has been seemingly orchestrating its own destruction from day one. It thrives in darkness and breeds madness in its wielders, not because it can, or even because it is good at it. It is solely because the one man that finally possesses the ultimate, perfected Sharingan, will be completely insane, but his eyes will have harnessed a demonic glow that never fades.

Danzō likes to think he is that man.

He is wrong, of course. They always are, but they can never be convinced otherwise.

Despite that, Danzō is rather perceptive about a great deal of things that others are not. He knows, for example, that there are over thirty-two different known doujutsu in Konoha's history. Perhaps ten of of them have actually been separate, actual doujutsu, but the rest have been the Sharingan, masquerading in another form. Danzō has found that they cannot maintain their masks after death, and he has come to recognize the signs while the users are still alive.

But as is often true of great men of vision, they usually cannot see what is directly behind them, and this was doubly true for Danzō.

* * *

Sai had never entertained any serious thoughts of betraying Danzō until he had met Naruto. Even now, he simply felt a great dislike for the old man, but certainly that wasn't motivation enough to take any permanent action.

But as Danzō lifts the small jar containing Tenten's eyes, Sai is struck by the realization that they are quite striking. Far too beautiful to join the unsightly mass of eyes that he knows awaits on Danzō's sealed arm. If nothing else, Naruto would not want such a fate for the eyes of his late friend.

Sai is also quite sure that Naruto would not agree with the fate that he himself has in mind for Tenten's eyes, but given a choice, Sai's alternative is the more humane one.

Danzō is so transfixed by Tenten's eyes (and perhaps her Sharingan has something to do with this) that he never even notices the kunai until it is buried deep in his heart.

Sai neatly plucks the jar out of Danzō's hand as the old man falls, and considers the best possible way to go about implanting them. It will be tricky, as he doesn't want anyone else to know, but obviously, it will be extremely difficult to manage himself. Danzō has given him the necessary skills, however, and so long as the pain and blood loss do not overwhelm him, Sai is fairly confident that only forty percent of his vision would be risked in the worst case scenario.

Just to be safe, however, he decides to practice on Danzō's corpse first. After all, it isn't as if he's using his eyes anymore. And even if he were, it wouldn't matter much to Sai.

**The End.**

* * *

Endnotes:

Hate the way this turned out, but this is the sixth rewrite, so I'm done with it.

I know, I know. You're going to tell me that even if Tenten had a hidden Sharingan, all it ever did beyond concealing itself was give her perfect accuracy. And maybe that's all she really needed it to do. Or maybe that's all it wanted to do. Kind of hard to stay hidden if you're doing flashy things like spitting black fire or bleeding all over the place (or wearing orange, but that's another issue entirely).


End file.
